IT WAS in Germany this summer when it was revealed that behind every average footballer there was a woman dancing on a table, indulging in sub-pub karaoke and drinking for England. It was all a little tawdry.

Good shops, bad form and a media obsessed with legs and bottoms. If England promised much, these women evidently had good futures behind them.

So it is nice to know that the WAG culture is not being replicated at the Ryder Cup. Instead of parading themselves in front of the world’s cameras with the desperation of reality TV wannabes, the wives and girlfriends of the world’s top golfers showed a welcome degree of decorum. “What’s a WAG?” Melissa Lehman, the wife of Tom, the United States captain, said. Explanation provided, she added: “Well, it could have been worse. Spouses and girlfriends would be SAG.”

There was still plenty of glamour at the Curragh, where Mrs Lehman and Glendryth Woosnam, her Europe counterpart, handed out trophies at a Ryder Cup Race Day rich in colour and money. Jodie Kidd, the supermodel and 22 handicapper, celebrated her horse, Cliche, coming third. She said that she would be watching the denouement of the Ryder Cup in Chris Evans’s pub in Surrey.

There were other clichés, too. For most of the afternoon, the wives remained ensconced in their marquee, outside which a couple of security guards stood. That was two fewer than had been spotted accompanying Tiger Woods’s wife, Elin, in the morning. If you knew that Mrs Lehman was once signed to sell a pedometer as a “motivational tool” designed to “achieve the ultimate wellness goal of 10,000 steps a day”, you might have wondered about the cult of celebrity.

But fear not. The “SAGs” wagged on a day when ¤million [about £675,000] was up for grabs in a single race, and proved that Brookline 1999 and Baden-Baden 2006 were black marks, not benchmarks.

“We’ve always got on,” Lehman said. “There was one blip, but since then some of us have been through tragedy and suffered. I think we all realise that this is a great life and that we’re very lucky our husbands do what they do.”

The sensible approach was delivered without putting a single stiletto on a table.

If the cult is such that you can even achieve fame via marriage these days, then at least the golf generation has a touch of class. And, while some people would rather they remain anonymous, the truth is that these women will be as pivotal as the two captains in calming, cheering and championing an assortment of fraying egos this week.

Take Mrs Lehman. When her husband was so disillusioned that he was thinking of taking a coaching job at the University of Minnesota on a $29,000 salary — “I got to thinking I was a complete failure as a human being” — it was Melissa who dragged him back from the precipice.

In 2000, she told him to wear a lucky shark’s tooth necklace and he promptly broke a three-year winning drought. The next year their child was delivered stillborn. Do not pretend that nice dresses and a public appearance mean that the Lehmans, the Woodses and the DiMarcos do not have perspective.

Mrs Woosnam knows the downside of golf, too. When her husband was being criticised some years ago, she said: “People don’t realise how much he puts into his golf, how much he agonises over his game.” Their son, Daniel, was being ribbed at school, too, but now she is savouring better times. “We’re one happy family and I’m just enjoying playing hostess to them all.”

After the death of Heather Clarke, yesterday might be termed the wake. No one has forgotten, but everybody is enjoying themselves. And if Mrs Lehman could not stop grinning, it was probably better than caddying for her husband, as she did in the 1998 Nissan Open. The transformation from bag to “SAG” is complete.